Spice and Wolf 12: Too much spice, not enougth wolf.

“I’d kiss you right here if you were a good lover” – Horo to Lawrence (17:30)

Translated in one word: REJECTED! O_O

Spice and wolf 12

Wolf and young pack

A most conspicuous looking party gathers at dawn in front of the gate of Rubinheigen ready to begin the gold smuggling quest. Lawrence the merchant, Horo the wolf, Nora the Shepherd and random NPC character Martin Liebert are accompanied by a herd of cloned sheep as they head on a three day journey to the next town.

Lawrence is playing his get out of jail free card, as he pins all hope on making a massive profit out of the smuggling run, unfortunately it’s a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire. The path they take is inhabited by badly drawn 4 legged creatures with luminous yellow eyes… which I think are supposed to be wolves.

To put it nicely the drawings, animation and perspective angles weren’t up to par. Perhaps the high number of different scenes and action sequences in this episode became overwhelming for a project drawing to a close.

To put it better; the animation was terrible. This episode is the ugly lovechild of Princess Mononoke and Captain Scarlet. While I really loved the scenery, especially the sunsetting over the cornfields, it would be more enjoyable if the characters and their puppet-like bobbing and invisible rain (no mud!?) wasn’t overlayed onto the backgrounds.

Compounding this sense of disillusionment is the escalating preposterousness of the storyline. Spice and Wolf was no good at the economics and it is equally poor with plot. Plot holes like the Sheep (which would just run off a cliff in real life), the betrayal of the Romerio company (they need Nora’s co-operation to succeed) and the leaving Lawrence to ‘die’ at the end (he won’t, big mistake; hasn’t everyone seen James Bond?). It’s real strength is Horo and unfortunately she was saddled with the matchmaker role this week.

Well, at least there is only one more episode to get through and it should be all about Horo. She did promise she’d be back and remember, she told Lawrence that she might be cold, wet and naked!

Responses

Why would the sheep run off a cliff? Even when there are wolves after them a well trained dog can keep them in line.

They were going to kill Nora after she smuggled the goods. She was told that the wolves had killed Horo and Lawrence so she would have done so willingly.

I think leaving him to die was plausible in this instance. The leader of the gang was a Christian suffering from cognitive dissonance; he didn’t consider it “killing” to simply leave the man to die. And perhaps he was hoping, at some level, that he would manage to escape.

In the James Bond films it was always completely absurd. They parodied the stupidity of that plot hole in Austin Powers.

And Lawrence is definitely an AFC. But Japan is the least sexually satisfied country in the world:

Not getting kissed or getting laid is what most Japanese men and women can relate to. The United States is getting pretty bad to, but it’s nothing like Japan. We need to have VH1s “The Pickup Artist” in Japan. & they need sex counselors! lots and lots of sex counselors

It’s been a while since I’ve seen Spicy Wolf but I will answer your comment as best I can without reviewing the material. I’m doing this because I find it interesting how you don’t find the narrative to be a straight forward, light hearted journey down the bleeding obvious!

I was utilising the exemplar of sheep and Laurence’s predictable survival to rightly point out how ill thought out, poorly devised and mundane the story had become at this point. While of course, all the characters could be killed off and Chloe could marry Horo before running off together, it didn’t happen. It was a letdown that the penultimate episode wasn’t at all exciting. It was probably rushed and packaged up prematurely to make it either finish in line with one of the light novel endings, budget pressures or just poor planning.

Your other point, is quite mistaken. Japanese apparent sexual timidness isn’t something that is reflected in animé. Although this needs some intricate and thoughtful research, it’s quite plain that Animé generally portrays quite the opposite with heavy emphasis on love stories, relationships and general sexualisation of animé girls and boys as objects of desire (depending on the target market). In my opinion, the articles deploring the sexual activity statistics are not because Japanese men or women are interpersonally deficient but because Japanese work-life balance is heavily tilted to the former. The Japanese are very committed workers, long hours in the office coupled with long commutes and little holiday means less time for tomfoolery.

Just thought I might as well chime in, for the heck of it. I think Lawrence is understandably sexually repressed. He’s living in medieval times, to begin with, where even a non-religious guy like Lawrence would have a lot of repression ingrained at an early age.

That, and Horo’s not exactly a normal human girl. Lawrence is non-romantic enough to have trouble with a normal girl like Nora. And yet, he can’t put a move on her, either, without worrying about Horo’s response.

I agree about the animation quality, it’s still pretty poor after the second season. The episode itself is forgettable, and the fact is that the whole second half of the first season is contrived. I’m willing to suspend disbelief, but it was ridiculous in places (especially Lawrence’s greed at the start, and Horo not kicking his ass for it.. such an obviously stupid thing to do).